


to talk like this, and act like that

by trell (qunlat)



Category: Borderlands (Video Games)
Genre: Coda, F/M, Moxxi's Heist of the Handsome Jackpot, trans themes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-25
Updated: 2020-05-25
Packaged: 2021-03-03 02:16:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,632
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24377122
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/qunlat/pseuds/trell
Summary: It hits Timothy, when the initial rush has worn off—right around the same time as the first round of painkillers, go figure—that he doesn’t actually have a way off the casino.Timothy and Ember at the end ofJackpot.
Relationships: Ember/Timothy Lawrence
Comments: 4
Kudos: 24





	to talk like this, and act like that

It hits Timothy, when the initial rush has worn off—right around the same time as the first round of painkillers, go figure—that he doesn’t actually have a way off the casino.

Maybe everyone aboard isn’t specifically out to kill him any longer, but he’s still not about to, _ugh_ , place any bets on any of those psychopaths being stable enough not to slit his throat on the way out, just for kicks. Moxxi could probably give him a lift, but the prospect of asking her for it—never mind surviving the ride aboard Sanctuary to wherever it is they’re going—is so embarrassing Timothy cuts the thought off before he can get any further. He’d rather part ways with the vault hunters here, with their last memory of him as the guy who saved all their asses, rather than the guy who had to beg for a ride home.

And when he’s done thinking about that he starts thinking about where he would even _go_ , and realizes that that’s an even more complicated question. He’s lost seven years of his life to this debt-accumulating deep space shithole, and he hadn’t had much of one even before that; had gone straight into working for Jack after college, shipped out to Elpis right after the plastic surgery took. He’s been dead to his mom for over a decade in literal terms, and figuratively speaking probably a lot longer than that—nothing and no one out there is waiting for him to come back, and he hasn’t got a clue how things have changed on the outside.

(He remembers one of the vault hunters telling him that Atlas is back in business, which is hard to believe; hadn’t Athena wiped them all out?)

Timothy stands on the steps of Jack’s Tower, looking down on the glimmering lights of the half-wrecked strip, and tries to think of what to _do._

When he does, he feels guilty for not thinking of that _first_.

*

Getting around the Jackpot proves easier than usual, now that he doesn’t have to be on the lookout for loader bots coded to attack the moment they pick up his signature. Timothy puts up his hood, tugs it down low over his eyes, and heads down to the Vice District, grimacing when Jack’s voice belts out of the speakers at the tram station.

Foxxxi’s Cabaret is dark when he arrives, and for a moment he’s scared he’s missed his target, arrived too late to say anything at all. He steps cautiously into the dim interior, and risks calling out, “Ember?” on the off chance that his luck hasn’t completely run out.

Something moves in the dim behind the bar, and he braces himself for the probable reality—that it’s just a looter, or one of Pretty Boy’s ex-enforcers, coming to collect something they’ve left behind—but then there’s the flare of a lighter, and Ember straightens into view, her uncapped finger held up for light. “Timothy!” In her accent it comes out _Timo-ty,_ gratifyingly familiar.

Timothy exhales, realizing only now that he’d been holding his breath, and hurries towards her. Maybe his luck has been replenished by that stunt he pulled up at the Tower, like karma: hit rock bottom and rebounded, as the gamblers claim.

As he nears he sees that Ember is packing, bags and firearms and clusters of exposed wiring strewn across the bar. “It is good that you came,” she says. “I feared I would leave without bidding farewell.” His heart lifts hopefully at the genuine warmth in her voice; _farewell_ isn’t good, that’s not what he’s here for, but if she’s happy to see him then maybe he’s still got a shot. “Moxxi had the impound bots release _La Femme Brûlée_ first, you see. I must hurry to beat the rush.”

He smiles crookedly at her. “Not sticking around to make this place Moxxi’s crown jewel, huh?”

“Her offer was very kind,” Ember says, and then, as his attempt to gesture around the smashed-up cabaret ends in an aborted jerk towards his torso, “oh, your hand—what happened?” She foists herself up on the bar before he can answer, swinging her legs down over the edge and moving fluidly into his space. Her hands find the mutilated stump of his wrist, wrapped now in gauze, and those beautiful blue eyes widen in shock. “Oh, _chéri_ . . .”

“Um,” Timothy says, stupidly, “it’s nothing, really, just a flesh wound, y’know,” laughing awkward—but then she turns his arm over, palm-up if he still had a palm, and the pain that shocks up his elbow makes him whimper in pain. “ _Aughhh, ow_ —be careful, _sonnova_ —”

“Ah, I did not mean—ah, Timothy.” Ember’s sigh filled with pained sympathy, and while he’s still gritting his teeth and wincing she pulls him into a tight embrace, her metal arm sliding under his leather jacket to wrap firmly around his back. Her body presses warm against his, and Timothy’s lizard brain rolls right over: as she leans in to rest the side of her face against his shoulder he sighs, and forgets, for a moment, everything that’s still wrong in his royally screwed-up life. “It is good you rid yourself of that awful thing. It would have been a cruelty, to carry around your link to this place.”

It dawns on him that she thinks he’s cut it off on _purpose_ , and he struggles up out of his oxytocin daze to explain. “Um—it wasn’t like that, actually. When the casino went on self-destruct, I, uh—well, Pretty Boy had me in this lazer cage, and the only way to get the Hand over to the controls was to lop it right off, so . . .”

“Oh,” Ember says, and withdraws a little to look up at him. He’s struck, in that moment, by how small she is: what with being apart for several months it’s been a long time since he’s looked at her from this perspective, and from half-way across a room the blazing force of her personality makes her seem taller than she really is. She goes on brusquely, “Well, all the same. _Un opportunité_. You will forge a new life for yourself, without the hand of Handsome Jacques.”

“Yeah." He likes that, he thinks; ridding himself of Jack, one piece at a time. Maybe if he puts up enough cash he can even get that DNA unspliced from his own . . . but, first things first. _Focus, kiddo._ “Listen, I, uh . . . I wanted to apologize. For breaking things off the way I did.”

She moves away, leaning back against the bar on her elbows and giving him an unreadable look. “Did you break them off?” she says, mildly. “I recall no such thing.”

“Er,” Timothy says, and he’s never been any good at relationships, not even when he’d been pretending to be that rich son of a bitch with all of Hyperion under his thumb, never mind as himself. “Well, you know, I, um, I left? I thought—I didn’t want you paying the price on my head, when you were hiding me from the gangs . . .”

“I know,” Ember says, like this is the most obvious thing in the world. “It was good timing. They got to Trent not long after that, and Trent sent them to me. It was fortunate you were gone when Pretty Boy’s men arrived.” She smiles, sudden and sharp, her eyes sparking in the dim. “You would have been blown up along with them—sixteen chained blocks of C-4, plus a satchel charge as the _coup de grâce_. Our old hideout burned wonderfully on top of them.”

“God, you’re so hot when you’re talking about explosives,” Timothy says, unthinking. Then, remembering himself, “But, I mean—you didn’t—you didn’t think I broke up with you?” He’s been wondering for a while why she hadn’t tried to set him on fire when they’d met up again for the heist, but the notion that she might have simply _understood_ hadn’t even entered his mind.

“Do you want me to think this?”

The question brings him up short. “I—” And he doesn’t know how to answer, because: he _had_ broken up with her, in his head. In the months since they’d last been together he’s been walking around thinking of her as his ex, his old flame, guilty about the way he’d left but certain that they had, in fact, _split;_ being offered the opportunity to reverse that with just a word, to claim he hadn’t meant it, feels like telling a lie.

He doesn’t want to lie to her about this, or anything else. Being with her had made him feel— _seen,_ known for himself, not for his face or his hand or the stupid shit that comes out of his mouth when Jack’s DNA is running the show. He doesn’t want to take that knowing _away_.

But saying _yes_ would be a lie, too, and so Timothy gets out, “No? I mean—I—I _did._ I thought I broke up with you, but if I can take it _back_ then I don’t—it’s not—” He stumbles, and why is it that he can never get any use out of Jack’s goddamn glib tongue when he _needs_ it, rather than only when it’ll get him into the deepest possible shit—“So, I mean, _yes_ back then, but _no_ now, and, um . . .”

“Timothy,” Ember says, fiercely. Her gaze is as hot as the heart of her beloved fire, and it bores into him with all the efficiency of an RDX charge. “What are you trying to say?”

“I’m trying to say—” Timothy stops. Concentrates, and forces out the thing that’s yelling the loudest inside his head, drowning out all his excuses and tangled-up explanations. “I’m trying to say, I miss you.”

The words come out in a mashed-up mumble: totally pathetic, nothing at all like anything he’d planned on the way here. Timothy clams up, and stares helplessly back at her, still cradling his mutilated hand, trying to read the odd expression on her sharp face. He’s pretty sure she’s reconsidering letting him take back that breakup, right about now; realizing she’s dodged a bullet and trying to come up with a way to let him down easy, if she’s even going to bother with that. _He_ sure as hell wouldn’t want himself back, after all that.

Ember smiles.

Narrows her eyes, and says, “Well, then,” her sculpted brows quirking with amusement. “Would you like to come with me?”

“Would I—what?” He stares at her, not believing his ears.

“Would you, Timothy Lawrence,” says Ember, and pushes off the bar again, stepping towards him with all the grace she has onstage, “like to leave this accursed place,” her arms link loosely around his waist, “and come with me to seek the fire among the stars?”

It takes him a minute to process the offer, so disparate is it from what he’d expected. When he does, he says, “You—seriously? I mean, you really want that?” And, unable to stop himself, the guilty truth falling right out, “I mean, came down here because I thought I could ask you for a lift, but I didn’t—I didn’t think you’d actually want, um. Me.”

Ember’s arms tighten around his waist. “I know my desires, Timothy. Even if they come with—handsome demons.” Her lips are still curved into that impossible smile, pulling the rough scar that runs up her cheek askew. “Come with me. Change your hand, change your face—mold yourself into the work of art you wish to be, as I do. I will help you.”

The magnitude of everything wrapped up in that is overwhelming. The part where she wants him, with or without the face, even with how fucked up he is on the inside; the part where she’d help him rid himself of the body he’s been trapped in for half his life, and the part where he knows that she really _means_ it when she says she believes in changing oneself to the limit that medical science permits.

(“I grew up on Sercannus as a young man,” she’d told him once, “but my people are liberal with such things. My mothers have twice been my fathers, too.”)

His throat is painfully tight.

He’s still glad there’s nothing in Jack’s lexicon to override him, the answer he squeezes out all his own. “Yeah. I mean—that’s amazing, _yes, please_.” His hands—his _hand_ , he realizes anew, startled by the severity of the ghostly priopreception he feels past his right wrist—hovers at her bare metal shoulder, and he hesitates, not knowing if it’s too soon to do what he wants. “Can I—uh—I’d really like to kiss you, now.”

“ _T’es un imbécile_ ,” Ember laughs; and then her arms are wrapping around his neck, and Timothy forgets about the damn hand, and the casino, and focuses instead on her lips, burning against his own.

*

The kissing goes on for a long time, enough that Timothy starts wondering whether he needs to own up to the fact that there’s _absolutely no way_ he’s currently viable for a fuck; but then Ember’s ECHO beeps shrilly from where it’s sitting atop the bar, and she pulls reluctantly away, leaving him sighing with a mix of regret and relief.

The sound of Moxxi’s voice pouring out from the ECHO makes him start. “Your ship’s free and clear, sugar. Better get here fast, the exit lanes are about to be jam-packed.”

Ember says, “My thanks, madame,” and then, tone tinged with amusement, “I will hurry. I was—waylaid by a fellow traveler, as I made my preparations.” She flashes Timothy a smile, making him grin sheepishly back, and moves at once to resume packing, rather more rapidly than before.

“Ah,” Moxxi says, knowingly. And, without missing a beat, “Congratulations, Timothy.”

Timothy stares. “You—” He thinks better of questioning Moxxi, and hisses instead to Ember, “She knows about you and me?”

“Of course,” Ember says, like Moxxi knowing the details of his recent love life is the most natural possible thing. Timothy racks his brain for when they could have possibly had the _time_ , and comes to the conclusion that they must have had their heart-to-heart while Pretty Boy had had him caged up at the top of the Tower—that, or this is one of those damned women-only telepathy things.

(If he changed himself enough, he wonders, would he get to share in that telepathy, too?)

Aloud, he says only, “Thanks, Moxxi.”

“Be good to each other, now,” says Moxxi airily, and cuts the comm.

Leaving him rather shell-shocked by the whirlwind shifting of fate he’s experienced in the past hour, but there’s no time to dwell: because within minutes Ember has her bags packed, and as soon as she’s got them shouldered she’s grabbing his hand and pulling him out of Foxxxi’s, setting off for the impound lot at a run.

Timothy staggers along after her all the way out to the yards, thinking giddily, _Fuck you, Jack,_ over and over and over again, right up until he’s aboard the _Femme Brûlée_ —falling into a seat on the bridge as the hyperdrive spins up past sublight, Ember running the pilot’s pre-flight checks. Out past the viewport the glow of the black holes’ accretion disks blots out the stars, rendering anything further out nearly invisible, and he squints into that distant black as they break from the casino, trying to make out the pinprick lights, wondering if Jack intended that visual metaphor, too—

And then Ember’s metal hand finds his remaining own, and Timothy Lawrence stops thinking about Handsome Jack.

“To new enkindling,” Ember says, engaging the hyperdrive. The stars smear into gossamer lines.

Timothy holds her hand, and does not look back.


End file.
